https://archive.is/FKuhi (reuters)
https://archive.is/MIdNc (afp)
Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng met for about eight hours with U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer in Geneva in their first face-to-face meeting since the world's two largest economies heaped tariffs well above 100% on each other's goods.
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday that an 80% tariff on Chinese goods "seems right", suggesting for the first time a specific alternative to the 145% levies he has imposed on Chinese imports.
Neither side made any statements about the substance of the discussions nor signaled any progress towards reducing crushing tariffs as meetings at the residence of Switzerland's ambassador to the U.N. concluded at about 8 p.m. local time. (1800 GMT)
The discussions are expected to restart on Sunday in the Swiss city, according to an individual familiar with the talks, who was not authorized to speak publicly.
The 80% number is just something that Trump posted on his social media early on Friday morning, before any meeting ever happened.
UPDATE Trump posted on truthsocial, 1 hour ago. He describes the meeting with the phrases "total reset" and "great progress". I won't believe this until I hear the perspective from China's government.
I literally named the key authors of the theories I wrote in one of the comments above: Jia Genliang and Zuo Da Pei, who are both Marxist economists who understand the Chinese economy better than most of the neoliberals (for example, who could have seen the consumption problem coming from more than a decade ago?)
If you want a good read (or if you can find someone to translate into English), I strongly recommend Jia Genliang’s 《国内大循环：经济发展新战略与政策选择》 (The Great Domestic Circulation: Economic development strategy and policy choices, 2020) and 《现代货币理论在中国》 (Modern Monetary Theory in China, 2023). I was already doing some of the translation and posted sporadically here until my laptop blew up a couple months back. Nearly all of the author’s points about the mistake of not building up a strong consumer base and doubling down on export led growth, some made as far back as 2013-2015, and how that would make the Chinese economy vulnerable to US unilateral ending the longstanding economic arrangement, is all being played out today.
And somehow you think Justin Lin Yifu, literally the protege of Theodore Schultz and co-founder of Chicago School economics with Milton Friedman, is somehow the beacon of Chinese socialist economics?
And for the record (this is going to shock you), you know I’m a firm supporter of Deng’s reform right? I literally explained above how Deng’s reform ended in the 1990s and the entire 2000s was a wild neoliberal ride for China until Xi came to power in the mid-2010s to rein in private capital.
If you don’t know anything about this period, then I’m here for discussion and education, no need to be so arrogant and dismissive about a topic you don’t understand. The claim that my arguments are somehow “ultraleft” is complete nonsense and only exposes how little you understand China’s history. You have not put up any argument (any substantive pushback is totally fine by me, I like to engage in discussions, that’s the point of this forum) and simply dismiss them as “ultraleft” without anything to back them up.
And for all the historical events, you can simply look them up. How is China joining WTO in 2001, the US-backed organization that literally demands developing countries to strip off labor rights in order to gain a foothold in the global market, somehow a controversial topic here? Are we not agreeing that the WTO is an imperialist arm of the US empire?
The PRC does not suddenly become a liberal country because it has some advisors who studied in the US or worked for the WTO, nor do the excesses and missteps of the wild 90s negate the socialist character of the CPC. The claim that the PRC is now a liberal country, and abandoned Marxism, because it became a member of the WTO, is equally ignorant. The PRC did not join the WTO because it "became liberal", it did so because its one of the larger international trade orgs, and the PRC's socialist market economy tends to do a lot of world trade.
Cuba and Vietnam are also both WTO members. Are they also liberal countries now too?
I apologize if I unduly called you an ultraleft, but this one drop of blood fallacy you're committing here is typical of ultraleft critiques of AES states. "You're a member of the WTO? You must have abandoned Marxism!"